I found a very handy way for users to import their Postnuke, PHP-Nuke, or Joomla site/blog to a Wordpress blog (hosted on Wordpress.com) without any custom scripts. This method will keep all the sites categories (in fact it will update the Wordpress blog's categories to use the same names as the originating site.)

The main problem is that if you create a blog based on Wordpress' own servers you do not gain the option to import via an RSS feed. The other options given are all very blog centric, and do not help those using a more complex CMS such as Postnuke or Joomla. Whilst, if you create your own Wordpress based site you do get this function. So in short you create a temporary Wordpress site on your own domain, import to it through RSS, and import that site to your Wordpress hosted blog. Carry on reading if you want this broken down...


To mirror, or import, a site to Wordpress from a CMS like Postnuke, you need to be on a host which allows you to create a sub domain, where you will install a 'temporary' or 'buffer' (if you like) Wordpress install. Now this allows you to import your Postnuke or Joomla site to the temporary Wordpress blog through an RSS feed, which in this case is your sites backend.php. Simply go to your site, right-clock your backend.php link and select download file. Now go to your temporary Wordpress site and go to 'Manage' then 'Import', you should choose 'Import from RSS' and in that menu select your downloaded backend.php.

By doing this you will have created a blog which has all your original sites posts and categories nicely imported across; now all you should need to do is go to 'Export' in the 'Manage' menu and export the blog as a Wordpress XML file, which can be imported to your Wordpress.com site.

Why Wordpress.com does not allow you to simply import an RSS file I do not know, but this workaround will do all the work for you without messing about with MySQL or any scripts.